At Gartner, one of our favorite reports as analysts is the Cool Vendors report each team does every year. By definition, Cool Vendors are small vendors that offer innovative products or services. The innovation may be in how the product works or in what can be accomplished by those using the product or service. Essentially, it is our chance to pick vendors that are doing unique and cool things in a particular area of our coverage.

This year, my colleagues Dale Hagemeyer,Janet Suleski, Michael Shanler, and I identified four vendors in our published report Cool Vendors in Consumer Goods Manufacturing, 2015. These Cool Vendors share a set of innovative approaches that support the path to digitalization and can bring more value to consumer goods companies. They demonstrate knowledge of the consumer goods space, have embedded that knowledge into their applications and seek to offer solutions that can drive more effective innovation, product life cycle management, category management and e-commerce execution.

The four Cool Vendors vendors for 2015 are:

Betterific is a crowdsourcing and innovation platform for consumer-oriented companies seeking fast white-space ideas for internal or external opportunities.

Embodee delivers high-fidelity 3D digital product views of apparel and fashion products that can be rendered from any angle a customer or consumer prefers to see them.

Periscope, a McKinsey Solution is a suite of solutions that combines promotion and assortment optimization with shopper analytics in a continuous loop process.

Do you have a Cool Vendor that you use in sales, marketing, or product lifecycle management? Or are you a niche vendor that offers an interesting solution to the challenges and opportunities faced by consumer goods manufacturers? If so, drop me a line as we are always scouting the landscape.

Don Scheibenreif
Vice President and Distinguished Analyst 5 years at Gartner 5 years IT Industry

Don Scheibenreif is a Vice President and Distinguished Analyst with Gartner's Enterprise Architecture and Technology Innovation research group. He works with with enterprise architects and other IT leaders on how emerging trends and digital business will impact enterprise architecture and enterprise digital transformation. Read Full Bio

Thoughts on 2015 Cool Vendors in Consumer Goods

Hi Laura – you can contact Jonathan Schilit, Co-Founder, Betterific; @jschilit | 240-305-4206. He shared with me “We don’t do retail audits specifically. We do however work with retail clients as it relates to innovation–generating ideas, evaluating ideas, etc. We also have new collaborative survey tools which they might find interesting. Happy to have a conversation to learn more what they’re looking for” Hope this helps.

Love hearing about new, cool vendors. I just attended a RevTech Accelerator session in Dallas yesterday and heard about some other new companies making an impact in CPG/retail. Check out:
– Invodo
– eyeQ
– Oculus360

Meta

Comments or opinions expressed on this blog are those of the individual contributors only, and do not necessarily represent the views of Gartner, Inc. or its management. Readers may copy and redistribute blog postings on other blogs, or otherwise for private, non-commercial or journalistic purposes, with attribution to Gartner. This content may not be used for any other purposes in any other formats or media. The content on this blog is provided on an "as-is" basis. Gartner shall not be liable for any damages whatsoever arising out of the content or use of this blog.